Supermarket waste – blue sky thinking

ANNOUNCER: Tesco chucked away 30,000 tonnes of food in the first half of this year. If you laid all that end-to-end you’d have three rockets the size of Wales going to the moon and back. Their Marketing Department decided they had to do something.

PR 2: Yeah – like, we change the way people think about the thing we can’t change.

MARKETING EXEC: Yep, yep. Understood. People buy salad: it rots in their fridge. We know that. We need to make them happy about that.

PR 2: What, like make it fashionable? We need a Damien Hurst salad shark.

PR 1: Wow – yeah. We could sponsor a whole art prize, where you could get like – kids – making sculptures with cabbage leaves …

MARKETING EXEC: Guys. Guys. It’s not just salad. We have to chuck almost half our bakery stuff too.

PR 1: Who buys a cake and then doesn’t eat it?

PR 2: Dieters. We could lobby parliament to criminalize the 5:2 mentalists.

PR 1: Or get Jamie or Hugh to do a series entirely on left-overs.

PR 2: Stale leftovers.

PR 1: The benefits of mould. “Penicillin: the new wonder diet.”

MARKETING EXEC: Loving the creativity guys. Loving it. But maybe a bit more of the workable stuff and less of the salmonella lawsuit area?

PR 2: OK. We could weigh Job Centre Plus chavs and employ the obese ones. End of the day: feed them the leftover bakery items.

PR 1: Awesome! They could be in an open pen by the tills. We could dress them in animal onesies and get a TV company interested.

PR 2: Fatties food fight!

MARKETING EXEC: Again – loving the spark, guys. Just … maybe a bit too close to a human zoo? Not au fait with all the legal technicalities, but I’m pretty sure we can’t lock people up and make them eat stale eclairs.